Carly Kind’s Post

Last week the Attorney-General announced the introduction of the first tranche of the long-awaited Privacy Act reforms. Here, in the first instalment of a blog series delving into the most significant components of the proposed reforms, my colleague Rebecca Brown explores the proposed Children's Online Privacy Code. https://lnkd.in/e-_Mf8Ba

Delighted to announce the launch of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner blog! I see this channel as a key mechanism for increasing the transparency and visibility of our work in privacy and information access, for sharing additional insights related to our enforcement decisions, and for exploring emerging issues and trends. Our first post is by Sarah Ghali on our ongoing work in relation to Arca's application to vary the Credit Reporting Code: https://lnkd.in/eh-KAJyC

A hugely stimulating discussion with Creina Chapman GAICD, Gina Cass-Gottlieb and Julie Inman - Grant and our colleagues on the challenges and opportunities we face in regulating digital platforms. Given the immense task underway, this kind of cooperation is critical to ensure effective regulation in this space.

Increasingly, people are being asked to pay for their privacy. Subscription services that withhold targeted ads in exchange for payment may seem appealing at first, but the premise that underpins them - that you should have to pay for the privilege of not having your personal information analysed - is really problematic (as the European Data Protection Board recently concluded in an important opinion: https://lnkd.in/e4nFN-Sw). But Australians also pay for privacy in another way - with their time. Important research from Consumer Policy Research Centre shows just how much it costs us to manage our privacy, read privacy policies (14 hours), and change default settings (30 mins) on a daily basis. For more than a third of sites and apps surveyed in the research, the option to adjust privacy settings was simply absent (37%). This research underpins a really important point - it is not that people don't care about their privacy, but that they frequently don't feel that they have any agency to control who has what information about them and how it is used. In the words of the CPRC report, "privacy cannot be an accountability that rests solely on the shoulders of individual Australians." https://lnkd.in/e6CfRpFk

Honoured to have had the chance to sit down a talk privacy (my favourite topic) with Johanna Weaver Tech Policy Design Centre. Slightly regretful about invoking Marie Antoinette, however - I'm hoping the similarities between us begin and end with cake!

As Maslow's hammer dictates, when you're the Privacy Commissioner, everything looks like a privacy problem. Much of the Australian news discourse is currently preoccupied with real public concern at harmful developments in online platforms - from misogynistic content and deepnude apps targeted at young men, to scams designed to catch out older internet users - yet rarely is the connection made between the worst features of the online ecosystem and the privacy-invasive business model which enables them. Today alone I read about Andrew Forrest's attempt to bring accountability to Meta's algorithmic amplification of scams (https://lnkd.in/e5sp7f6g), the emergence of deepnude apps being used across Australian schools (https://lnkd.in/eyUcGUSW) and the growing prevalence of 'misogynistic radicalisation' (https://lnkd.in/eHEjs7St). Yes, we need better education for young people and parents and older people in the critical consumption of online content. But we also need stronger privacy laws, robust enforcement of existing ones, and global collaboration and leadership to tackle the cross-jurisdictional and ecosystem-level harms of the data economy. As Lizzie O'Shea and Samantha Floreani argued in this excellent op ed from April 2024, "The underlying business model is rotten, and that ought to be the focus of our attention." https://lnkd.in/eumgriCY